I was excited when I saw the title of a recent blog, that Matt Fenwick, Founder of True North Content had written, called The Northstar Framework: A Guide for Smarter Communications Decisions.

It’s a fairly common scenario for a lot of comms professionals and I know I’ve certainly been in this position loads of times. I’m either stuck with a bunch of ideas, and don’t know which ones to go with, or I’ve got a plan all set and then, one random morning, after the boss or a client has read a blog or listened to a podcast, they get all excited and say, “Hey, we should be doing this new ABC or XYZ thing!”.

Maybe it’s TikTok or Vine or whatever the kids are into. And that latter one is hard because they are the boss or the client and they are all excited but, deep down, you know it isn’t a good idea. But how do you say, “No” or, better still, how do you give the idea some air and work towards a smart decision of ‘yes’ or ‘no’?

The reason I was excited when I saw Matt’s blog, The Northstar Framework: A Guide for Smarter Communications Decisions, was because I’d sort of toyed with the same type of idea, a flow chart/decision process/matrix to help us work through deciding whether we should use a marketing tactic or not.

I, however, had never given it any serious bandwidth to try and figure out. So, I was happy when I saw that Matt had done all the work for us all and, to be fair, he’s done a better job than I probably would have!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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Daniel:

Hey, Hey, legends, pumped to have you joining me for this episode of Marketing Builder and also the super smart Matt Fenwick, founder of True North Content, that’s the voice you heard right at the start of the show.

Daniel:

I was excited when I saw the title of a recent blog that Matt had written called The Northstar Framework: a guide for smarter communications decisions. It’s a fairly common scenario for a lot of comms professionals and I know I’ve certainly been in this position loads of times. I’m either stuck with a bunch of ideas and don’t know which ones to go with or I’ve got a plan all set and it’s all running okay and great and everyone’s happy. Then one random morning after the boss or a client has read a blog or listened to a podcast, they get all excited and they burst in and say, “Hey, we should be doing this new ABC or XYZ thing.”

Daniel:

Maybe it’s Tik Tok or Vine or whatever the kids are into at the time. That latter one is hard because they are the boss or the client and they’re all excited but deep down, you know it isn’t a good idea, but how do you say no or better still, how do you give the idea some air and work towards a smart decision, an educated decision, one you have a conversation about and then get to a yes or no. The reason I was excited when I saw Matt’s blog, The Northstar Framework: a guide for smarter communications decisions, I was excited because I’d sort of toyed with the same type of idea or a flowchart or a decision process or a matrix or whatever, to help us work through deciding whether we should use a certain marketing tactic or not.

Daniel:

But, I’d never given it any serious bandwidth to try and figure it out, so I was happy when I saw that Matt had done all that hard work for us, and to be fair, he’s done a better job than I probably would have anyway. So there is no doubt Matt has experienced the same conundrum himself, probably many times. So I started out by asking Matt what prompted him to actually do something about it?

Matt:

That exact scenario, Daniel. I was talking to clients and it seemed like they were drowning in options. It felt like they were owned by their channels, not the other way around. Rather than thinking about how those channels actually work for us and adding value. Sometimes our marketing channels can feel like having young kids, they just type as much as you have to give and it really frustrates me and I know from our other conversations, it frustrates you too.

Matt:

People doing marketing for the sake of it or because someone else has told them that they should be doing X, Y, Z. So I wanted to create a really simple tool that would help them to work through those questions in a structured way and really think about the value to the business. The one other thing I would want to say is, we’re recording this just as a coronavirus is kicking off and impacting a lot of people. I know a lot of people out there in businesses and in comms roles will be thinking, what should I be doing? What’s really important for me to be doing right now versus all that nice to have stuff. So I guess my hope is that the framework might be useful for people and having those conversations.

Daniel:

Just to get something out of the way fairly early. Is this framework something that people can just pick up and follow or do they need to contact you and pay a license to be able to use it?

Matt:

I actually had one of my friends who runs a marketing agency reach out and offered to pay me to use it and I just said, “No, this thing is out there for free.” It’s on a cc-by license, which is a fancy way of saying you can use it however you want, just please acknowledge True North. Then of course we do run workshops and coaching calls and that sort of thing where people want to work through it in a little bit more depth.

Daniel:

Perfect. That sounds fair. Well it is definitely an issue that a lot of us face and a lot of us muddle our way through it, so it sounds very exciting, so let’s jump into it. What is The Northstar Framework, because I know there is a visual element to it, so you might need to describe it for us because this isn’t a great medium for images?

Matt:

First thing I’d say is if people want to follow along and they’re anywhere near a computer or their phone, then you can jump on my website, truenorthcontent.com.au, go to my blog and look for the post on, how to make smarter communications decisions, and you’ll see the Northstar Framework set out for you right there, but I’ll step through it super quickly.

Matt:

The first thing we’ve got is, draw a circle and in that circle write ‘user need’, and actually if you’re a bit of a math nerd like me, you might remember Venn Diagrams, you know those overlapping circles. Okay, so we’ve got ‘user need’ that’s in one circle, then next to that, draw another circle. So they’re just overlapping in the middle-

Daniel:

On the right?

Matt:

On the right. Yep. So we’ll call that ‘business need’. Then above those two circles, sort of nestled in the middle there, we’ll draw another circle and there we’ll write ‘resourced’ and then down the bottom, we’ll draw a final circle and in that circle we’ll write ‘unique value’. Assume that your drawing skills are better than mine, you should have something that looks a little bit like the pedals of a flower, all of those circles overlap in a central point and that point is your North Star.

Daniel:

Okay. So you listed those four elements in an order you started with ‘user need’. Is that a logical order that people need to work through or is one more important than the other or they all pretty much equal?

Matt:

It’s all about what is easiest for businesses to work through and for people to make sense of. I would usually start with either a business need or the human need or the user need and of those two, I would tend to start with the user need. The reason for that is that when we’re in an organization, we’re often so close to what we need that we can’t see the forest for the trees. By starting with the user need, it helps us to snap out of that a bit and to see our business from the outside.

Daniel:

Excellent. Great setup. So let’s work through each of those individually. The first one, if we did pick the business need, the first one is the ‘business need’. What do we have to work through there?

Matt:

Okay, so this is about trying to understand what do we need to achieve for our business to succeed. It could be a marketing objective such as, we want to generate more leads to this product or if people are in a not for profit, it might be an awareness objective. We want people to understand how to wash their hands or not touch their face. You would usually find the business need in your marketing strategy or your strategic plan. Sometimes it’s going to be legislation that you need to comply with as well, so I’d also call that a business need.

Daniel:

So next is the ‘user need’. What are we then focusing on at that step?

Matt:

This one is a need that an actual human has and it sounds really simple, but so often when we’re putting out comms, we just assume that people are interested in what we have to say, but the reality is that people don’t actually need our content, none of them. They need the thing that hopefully our content helps them to do. It’s so important that we think about the user need with some evidence behind us and that doesn’t need to be super, super rigorous. It can be but equally if you’ve got sales guys or women in your team, then you can ask them what questions the customer is always asking. Your SEO, your website analytics will often tell you that kind of stuff.

Matt:

To make it a bit simple, I usually break down a user need into one of two categories and that’s a basic need. So that’s a fundamental need like comfort, security, emotional connection, distraction. Then the other one is task need and that’s thing that people want to get done. That might be, find out what the returns policy is on this bulk pack of toilet paper that I just bought, so the task need is going to be something much more transactional and specific.

Daniel:

I’m going to leave ‘resourced’ to last, which means that I need to move to ‘unique value’, that’s the third one. What are we focusing on when we’re looking at unique value?

Matt:

This one is about thinking what are we uniquely placed to offer because of their authority, because of what we know, because of the personality that we have in our brand. I’ll give you one example. I was working with the skilled migration team in the ACT government, these are the people who… You want to move from overseas and you want to live in Canberra, you’ve got valuable skills, so what’s the program that might mean that we would end up helping you find a place here?

Matt:

We looked at the question of Australia’s visa system and what we worked out very quickly is that for the ACT government, my client, there wasn’t any unique value in man talking in any depth about the visa content because the Australian Department of Home Affairs is already producing all of that stuff. In that situation we would just link off to what’s already out there and if you’re thinking about this in a content marketing context, it means asking who else is already producing useful stuff and do we really need to reinvent the wheel or can we just link off to their stuff, share it and get the information in front of people that way.

Daniel:

I’ve left resourced till last because in my head it makes sense that we think about, does it suit a ‘business need’, can we align it to a ‘user need’ as you said, are we in a unique position to be able to add some ‘unique value’ and then, because it kind of feels to me is though if you get ticks in those three criteria, it’s probably a good idea to find resourcing for it.

Daniel:

When we talk about adding new things into our marketing, a lot of people, their default response is, really busy, budgets are already stretched, but this feels as though we’re trying to set this up to say, “Guys, this is actually really important, ticks a lot of boxes. We should push forward.” I’m guessing resourcing is all about whether we have the skills, the time, and the money to execute something that we think we should be doing?

Matt:

Yeah, exactly and that scenario that you mentioned right at the top, Daniel, where the boss flies in to your office or to your desk and says, “I’m really excited about Tik Tok.” Often senior management get excited about ideas without necessarily thinking through the resourcing considerations. That’s why a lot of my clients feel really, really stressed because they feel like they should be doing this stuff, but it’s on top of everything else that they’re already doing.

Matt:

The resourcing question is about saying, “Yeah, do we have budget, do we have time, do we have skills?” And it’s a prompt to have a constructive conversation around, do we allocate more resources to this or do we bump some other things off the perch so we do have the capacity to take on this new exciting thing.

Daniel:

I think it’s also an important point to make that if you go through this process listeners and you do it well, then in your mind… I think sometimes there’s a lot of marketers out there and communications professionals out there that are worried that they’re not playing in a particular space, but all it is is that that fear of missing out and everyone else’s over there. So should we be over there and maybe yes or no, but if it’s a no and you’ve gone through this process, then you’ll feel way more at ease that you’ve made a strategic decision not to be going and playing in that certain space. So Matt, is the outcome of this process just a simple go or no go decision for any tactic or marketing that we might place into this process?

Matt:

It doesn’t have to be. It might end up that you decide… Look, we were pretty sure that this thing meets a business need and it’s like this was the scenario. A recent client who had an idea to do an app, so website application that would help connect people looking for sponsorship up with businesses that were looking to sponsor. Anyway we knew very, very clearly that it met a ‘business need’, but it was a question mark about whether or not it met a ‘user need’ and whether it would offer ‘unique value’ and it was going to be expensive. So that was another question mark around ‘resourcing’.

Matt:

Sometimes it’s going to be a no go decision, but other times it might be just, we need to go and do a bit more thinking or do some research about this. Just bouncing off what you’re saying earlier, Daniel, around the everyone else is doing this, just occurred to me, it’s quite interesting because other people are doing this doesn’t fall anywhere on The Northstar Framework. It’s not a ‘user need’. It’s not a ‘business need’ because it’s someone else’s business, not yours. It doesn’t speak to ‘resourcing’ and even on ‘unique value’, the fact that other people are doing it might be a reason not to do it.

Daniel:

I outlined at the start, the issue of evaluating some options and new ideas as they come across your desk, but is this framework something that people can use to run over what they’re already doing and make decisions about where they should continue or stop things?

Matt:

Yeah, exactly. We’ve used this for a couple of clients where we look at what they’re already doing, and I’ll just give you one example. We’re working with Study Canberra, which is the team that’s responsible for attracting people to come and study at all of Canberra’s fine institutions. We looked at existing blog posts that they had up on their site, and there was one that talked about ANU and University of Canberra ranking really well in the world league title for universities.

Matt:

We know from our research that students, particularly international students, really care about that kind of stuff, so that one was a yes. It’s still right in the middle of the North Star. It’s also fairly quick and cheap to pull together, but there was another blog post which was about University of Canberra discovering a new lizard and that didn’t fall anywhere in the Northstar Framework. So basically, you’re plotting tactics according to whether they are in and out of those individual circles and based on that we’re able to go, “You know what, this doesn’t really meet any of our criteria, so we’re going to stop doing that.”

Daniel:

What do you think Study Canberra were feeling or experiencing leading up to going on site and helping them work through and evaluate all of that stuff using your framework. What were they experiencing? What sort of situation were they in where they thought to themselves, “You know what, we need to review this stuff?” So I want this to align to other listeners who might have lots of different content and Study Canberra have made a decision to review it. What prompted it?

Matt:

We were brought on to review canberra.com.au which is the flagship site for our city, so we were doing a complete review of Study Canberra’s content, but all of these other websites as well, that we’d need to merge into this one place. To speak to kind of what they were feeling before we engaged them, exhausted would be the first thing that springs to mind. When I was running through this framework with them in a workshop, the boss of the section got so excited that he brought in the rest of his team to take part. I’ve since been told by him that he and his team refer to it pretty much every day. That’s really good for me to hear because it tells me that it’s actually making a difference to their decisions.

Daniel:

Outstanding. Clearly The Framework is a great tool for assessing marketing comms activities or that new ones that are suggested or you think of or reviewing current situations, but Study Canberra had heard of a course finder tool that could integrate into their website. So they used it to assess the features of that software, didn’t they?

Matt:

Yeah, they did. I’m sure you run into this a fair bit as well, this tendency to jumps straight to building a new thing or launching a new channel and this bit of software was going to be expensive. It was at least $40,000 to set it up and then ongoing licensing fees. Just to tell you exactly what the software would do, the idea was that you’d come to Study Canberra section on website and there would be a search bar integrating with the website and you’ll be able to figure out if a course you were looking for was offered somewhere in Canberra and which universities offered it.

Matt:

It sounded good, but what we learned from our research is that people actually decide first on the course that they’re going to study way upstream of where they’re actually going to study it. This is particularly international students. So in that scenario, the bit of software didn’t actually meet a user need in the context of them engaging with Study Canberra. They’d already made that decision, so it didn’t meet the ‘user need’ and that 40k plus, it wasn’t really something that they were resourced to do. So two hour workshop, bit of extra thinking, potentially saved them $40,000.

Daniel:

That is always handy on the bottom line. Listeners, you can find a run through of this northstarframework@truenorthcontent.com.au, under the blog section, there’s a link to the case study that Matt’s written around the work that he did with Study Canberra and of course there’s a link in the shownotes@marketingbuilder.net but Matt, if people want to get in touch and keep the conversation going or they need your help in this space, what can they do?

Matt:

Easiest thing is just to shoot me an email at matt@truenorthcontent.com.au. Right now we’re offering a two hour session. We’ll run through the Northstar Framework with you, either over a new idea or your current marketing plan and give you some clarity on what’s worth sticking with and what you could maybe put on the back burner for a while. Also, really happy to just answer any questions that people have got and hear their stories of how they’ve used this framework and yeah, what it did for them.

Daniel:

Outstanding. I love it. Well done. Great job, Matt. I’ve already shared it with a few people and a few clients and so thanks for coming on the show and sharing.

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